Meetings can have different frequency options depending on the need and purpose. Meeting organizers may decide whether another session should be conducted or a one-time meeting will suffice. Regardless of the number of repetitions a meeting may have, the meeting facilitator must make sure that a meeting follow-up is performed. It does not necessarily have to be another meeting but simply a spot check of any work progress.
Making a follow-up is simply monitoring the progress of any task assigned to the participants during the meeting. But in some cases, a team may need to go through another meeting to check on any development.
Meeting Follow-up Explained
How do you understand meeting follow-up? It is simply an action performed after a meeting discussion and delegation of assignments. If the issues discussed require action plans from the participants, a follow-up is necessary. Commonly, the meeting facilitator or the meeting manager does the follow-up, but the participants have to contribute in keeping track of progress by providing updates, delivering any required output, or performing any implementation.
Let us use the business setting as a good example to illustrate the notion of a meeting follow-up. In business, meetings are very crucial to regularly keep the individuals abreast of any updates and developments.
Your manager may call for a meeting to talk about the decline of sales in the past quarter and the objective is to get back on track with the sales output by correcting any flaws causing the deflation since it greatly affects production. After the session, the follow-up may be doubling the efforts to reach sales quota and provide a daily report of any sales activity to the manager. Every member must adhere to providing a follow-up to the boss.
Complying task deadlines and giving a follow-up will help materialize the goals of a meeting. Task deadlines are usually generated during the meeting. After which, every meeting participant must be responsible for taking action on whatever task needs to be performed as well as providing a follow-up.
Importance of Meeting Follow-up
Apparently, we make a meeting follow-up to keep track of any progress of the action plans from the previous meeting. In business, one of the ways to know how well a business is doing is through a meeting follow-up. It is during this time that accomplishments and weaknesses are pointed out after action is done.
Not all issues in a meeting are resolved at one time because of certain factors that may hinder the participants from arriving at a resolution. Due to time constraints, unfinished meetings are put to a temporary halt until the next session. The next meeting can become a follow-up and will provide the members an opportunity to finally straighten out any pending issue.
The meeting in-charge may conduct follow-up halfway between meetings to make sure that any individual assignment is underway. But everyone is accountable for reporting any progress in the next session.
How to do a Meeting Follow-up
So how is meeting follow-up performed? As mentioned earlier, the meeting in-charge may conduct the spot check of any work progress of participants in between meetings. This follow-through process may be done through email or phone call. Emailing the participants on their task output is applicable if there is no need to gather and bring pending issues back on the meeting table for another discussion.
In common instances, a follow-up can be in the form of another meeting in order to discuss whether the agreement has been worked out well. That is why the minute taker or recorder plays a vital role in this aspect of the meeting since the individual is responsible for documenting all key points and highlights of the previous meeting including any pending or unresolved issues. The documentation serves as the very basis for conducting a check-point of the things that were covered. When conducting follow-up meetings, make sure that the session is brief and direct.
Follow-ups can be done by schedule apart from doing it midway in the meetings. The meeting manager may request the members to submit a daily or weekly output of their task. All meeting participants must understand the importance of these required submissions to check for any accomplishment of the meeting objectives.